Karlovy Vary 2025: The Luminous Life | Interview with João Rosas

For a debut feature film, Portuguese film director João Rosas chose to tell a tender coming-of-age story about a 25-year-old man undecided on what to do in life—an exploration of doubt, identity, urban fragmentation, and the emotional tremors of adulthood in a time of disorientation. The Luminous Life premiered at the 2025 Berlinale Forum and is aiming for the Crystal Globe at the 2025 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

“I’ve been following the same Nicolau (the protagonist) since 2012,” he said. “This is my first fiction feature, but I’ve worked with this character—Nicolau, played by Francisco, who’s not even an actor—for years.”

The Luminous Life is pure fiction, not a docudrama. “It’s completely written and staged,” said João. “I just like to work with non-actors because it’s a way of relating and getting to know people and bringing them into a fictional universe. But the film is not based on their lives.”

The director has, in fact, carefully constructed this tension between the real and the fictional, the concrete and the ephemeral in cinema.

This film offers not just a youth drama—it goes further, making the city of Lisbon a character in the film, with its sunlit façades and shifting topographies.

The film opens with a slow, gliding pan across a choir, its members singing with quiet fervour. It’s a poignant beginning that he stresses is both literal and symbolic. “The choir exists in real life; it’s where I discovered two of the actors. But it also serves as a kind of Greek chorus, singing about doubt. ‘Of all the things certain, the most certain of them is doubt.’ That’s the theme of the film.”

This motif of uncertainty weaves its way through the entire narrative. Nicolau is a listener, a gentle observer amid a cacophony of voices. Friends, lovers, and strangers talk around him—confessing, hesitating, asserting. Nicolau remains largely silent—not inarticulate, but reflective. “I was interested in portraying a male character who is not producing discourse, especially not about women. He listens,” Rosas says. “And the choir, with its rhythmic repetition and layered harmonies, mirrors this listening.”

The film’s central relationship between Nicolau and Chloé, an older woman, offers no traditional romantic arc but a deeper emotional entanglement. Chloé, with her reflections on symmetry, movement, and changing desires, becomes a symbol of vitality. “She has this laughter, this energy,” he added. “For me, she symbolizes this curiosity toward the world. This is what saves Nicolau.”

One of the film’s standout moments is a deceptively simple exchange between Nicolau and Chloé about what it means to be young. “How long are you going to be young?” she asks—laughingly but pointedly. “That line really stuck with me,” admits the director. “I think in the Western world there’s this blurry transition between youth and adulthood. It arrives later and later. People are stuck. They delay decisions, delay identity.”

João is not interested in nostalgia. Though 20 years older than his characters, he consciously avoids romanticizing the past. “I wanted to work with this generation, with non-actors, to understand their view of the city. Why is it so difficult now to grow up? Is it the economy? Is it climate change, Gaza, the sense of nihilism?”

He connects this confusion to a lack of rootedness. “The adults in the film are often fixed to places—the parents to the house, the clients to the store. Nicolau is mobile. Or at least he begins to be. He opens his map through other people.”

Mobility, for Rosas, is not just spatial but existential. The ghost of Nicolau’s ex-girlfriend hovers throughout the film—metaphorically and literally. She reappears during the final musical scene, their hands perhaps touching, perhaps not. “People ask me, are they really holding hands or is it a dream? I won’t say. Cinema isn’t made to give answers—it’s made to give clues.”

This openness is not indecision but an invitation. João, who writes his own scripts, talks about planting seeds—scenes, phrases, ideas that might rhyme later. “If you catch them, great. If not, you still follow the story.”

Despite his deep commitment to this character, he says he’s putting Nicolau aside for now. His next project will explore the midlife crisis—“people getting divorced, changing jobs, getting lovers.” But he’s not ruling out a return to his longtime protagonist. “Every time I say I won’t work with Francisco again, I get sad.”

Interestingly, he came to fiction from documentary. His last project, filmed on a construction site in Lisbon, ended with the unlikely friendship between him and an Indian labourer. “That film came from an invitation to film at a building site,” he says. “I didn’t know what would happen. But then these people I met—they forced me to make the film.”

For him, both fiction and documentary begin the same way: with curiosity. “Cinema is a way of questioning the world, of relating to people. I don’t use documentary as a stepping stone. It’s just another method, another rhythm. Fiction lets me build something from scratch. Documentary lets me immerse.”

We are thrilled to be reporting directly from the Czech Republic at the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.